Lamictal 300 mgs: Intermittent Dizziness, and Blue Light Therapy

I've been on 300 mgs of lamictal for a week now.  The dry mouth and GI effects seem to be gone.  The sleep phase issues are better than they were; however, they started improving when I started using the sun lamp are the time of the equinox.

The remaining effects are The Stupids and some balance problems -- which may actually be from overusing my blue light.

I've had trouble with my inner ear for several years now.  I had a lot of infections as a kid, and then outgrew them, only to have them return in my late teens as a fun side effect of severe allergies.  I spent much of my twenties with severe vertigo.  What I'm saying here is that I know dizziness from pretty much every possible angle.



Previously, my lamictal-related balance problems have been while exercising -- doing lunges or one-leg deadlifts, and oddly, more on my right (dominant) side than on my left.  For the last couple days, I've felt off-balance.  This is different than the vertigo I used to get, where it felt like the room was revolving slowly around me, or as if the floor was undulating beneath my feet. Sometimes it felt as if everything around me was moving closer and then farther away, like the view from a camera zoom lens.

Fun fact from my ENT: there are different types of vertigo depending on whether the subject feels like they're the one spinning, or whether they feel that their environment is spinning.  Previously, I've always experienced the second type.

Over the weekend I felt like a sailor who hadn't gotten her land legs yet.  I was the one heeling over and rebalancing, trying to find the floor.  My balance problems with weightlifting were more significant than usual, to the point where my form was affected.  I'm lucky I didn't pull a muscle in my back.

At first, I blamed the lamictal for this -- I titrated up to 300 recently, after all, and that always increases some side effects.  Today I realized that my problems might be from overusing my blue light therapy device.  Googling the question turned up nothing, but hey, Google isn't all-knowing, right?  Right.

Blue light therapy devices, unlike full-spectrum lamps, are meant to be placed slightly above eye-level.  You're supposed to use them for 90 minutes.  Well, since I've used my sun lamp as a task lamp in the past, I figured it wouldn't hurt to just leave it on all day as I puttered around the internet.  It was gloomy and dark outside.  My mood needed the boost.  At this point I was on my third day at 300.

It seemed not to do any harm, so for the next several days, I left both my sun lamp and my blue lamp on all day.  No big, right?  Sure, I seemed to be feeling dizzy and off-balance, but maybe it was just taking a few days for the side-effects to show up.

This morning, I woke up without balance problems ... and then noticed them when I got up from my computer.  I decided to try turning off my blue lamp, and instantly felt better.  I felt like a weight had been lifted off my eyes -- and what's weirder still, as if some mild pressure had been taken off my inside my ears.  It wasn't like my ears popped, exactly, but like a weight had been removed from a cushion, and it was slowly regaining its loft.